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  • Marginalia Found in Books at the Vancouver Public Library
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Marginalia Found in Books at the Vancouver Public Library

Aislinn Hunter

In T.S. Eliot’s Collected, a hand written dedication,
To all self-worshippers.

Over the line in Lord Nelson’s letter to Lady Hamilton
where he confesses,
“I can neither Eat or Sleep for thinking of You my dearest love,
I never touch even pudding…”
AM loves JB, looped letters in fat pencil.

In a cookbook, recipes corrected,
an even hand that writes in blue pen
They’re wrong about the eggs.

In Heraclitus, Japanese kanji drawn lightly beside a fragment
on the boundaries of the soul –
a bird house with an open roof for journey,
a woman’s long skirt-train for road.

In Walter Benjamin’s essays, a question mark
after the word “civilization.”

By the account of “An Albatross Shot on 1 October 1719,”
the comment It could not have happened this way.

Only once, when I was young,
did I write in a book I did not own –

In the Collected Works of Emily Dickinson,
with a black ink pen from my father’s study

I noted:

it’s death, dear Emily,
with a small “d.”


Aislinn Hunter

Reproduced by permission of the author.

Tags:

books Canadian poetry graffiti libraries marginalia reading reading poetry
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Aislinn Hunter

Aislinn Hunter was born in Ontario and now lives in Vancouver, Canada. She teaches part-time and is also studying for a PHD from the University of Edinburgh. Her first collection, Into the Early Hours (2001), won the Gerald Lampert...
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